Esteemed Monks,

I just had to whip up a quick XML filtering prog to cleanup some nastily formatted XML files. Here's a quick snippet:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE VersionMaint PUBLIC  "- EN"  "http://path-to/the-dtd">
<VersionMaint>
   <MaintLevelInfo>
      <MaintId>
      </MaintId>
   </MaintLevelInfo>
   <MaintRequest>
      <AppId>987624</AppId>
      <AppName>TriggerVar</AppName>
   </MaintRequest>
</VersionMaint>
[download]

The goal being to cleanup any empty block (in this example the MaintLevelInfo and MaintId blocks but there are more, sometimes 3 or 4 levels of empty blocks). The following code works but it just feels bad, I'm thinking there has to be a better way surely:

sub filterXML {
   my $xml = shift;
   my @xmlPieces = split (/\n/, $xml);

   my ($tmpFilter, $flag) = filter (\@xmlPieces);

   while ($flag) { 
      ($tmpFilter, $flag) = filter ($tmpFilter);
   }
   my $filtered = join "\n", @$tmpFilter;
   return $filtered;
}

sub filter {
   my $items = shift;
   my (@new, $prev, $haveFiltered);
   for my $xmlLine (@$items) {
      my $test = $xmlLine;
      $test =~ s/^\s+//g;
      if ($test =~ /^<\// && $prev =~ /^<\w/) {
         unless ($prev =~ /<(.*)>(.*)<(.*)>/) {
            pop @new;
            $prev = $test;
            $haveFiltered++;
            next;
         }
      }
      push (@new, $xmlLine);
      $prev = $test;
   }
   return (\@new, $haveFiltered);
}
[download]

Needless to say there's nothing I can do about the way the XML is originally formatted, I'm just the lucky fellow who has to fix it.

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